An afternoon session on the workshop’s second day offered a panel discussion on environmental health policies and opportunities. The panel’s three speakers focused on assessments of health and sustainability as ways to inform policy making concerning biofuels. The panel moderator, John Balbus, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, noted that such assessments are crucial tools in determining how to weigh the different issues involved in the production and use of biofuels, which can run the gamut from environmental issues, such as fertilizer runoff and soil erosion, to social issues, such as the health of communities, to economic issues, such as the costs of food and fuel.

The first speaker was Lynn Goldman, dean of the School of Public Health at George Washington University. She discussed some factors that should be taken into account when assessing the health impacts of biofuels.

There have been a number of health policy drivers for biofuels production, she said. These include reducing air pollution, including greenhouse gas emissions from biomass fuels and coal; increasing fuel security; benefiting rural economies; and increasing energy availability, both for today’s growing populations and for future generations. She addressed each of these in turn.

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9
Environmental Health Policies and Opportunities
An afternoon session on the workshop’s second day offered a panel
discussion on environmental health policies and opportunities. The
panel’s three speakers focused on assessments of health and sustainability
as ways to inform policy making concerning biofuels. The panel
moderator, John Balbus, National Institute of Environmental Health
Sciences, noted that such assessments are crucial tools in determining
how to weigh the different issues involved in the production and use of
biofuels, which can run the gamut from environmental issues, such as
fertilizer runoff and soil erosion, to social issues, such as the health of
communities, to economic issues, such as the costs of food and fuel.
A FRAMEWORK FOR ASSESSING
HEALTH IMPACTS OF BIOFUELS
The first speaker was Lynn Goldman, dean of the School of Public
Health at George Washington University. She discussed some factors
that should be taken into account when assessing the health impacts of
biofuels.
There have been a number of health policy drivers for biofuels
production, she said. These include reducing air pollution, including
greenhouse gas emissions from biomass fuels and coal; increasing fuel
security; benefiting rural economies; and increasing energy availability,
both for today’s growing populations and for future generations. She
addressed each of these in turn.
137

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138 THE NEXUS OF BIOFUELS, CLIMATE CHANGE, AND HUMAN HEALTH
Reducing Air Pollution
Goldman noted that there are a variety of considerations to take into
account when reducing air pollution, specifically, levels of ozone,
particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, nitrous and sulfur oxides,
and metals like mercury. For example, policy makers should consider
how fuels burn, and whether one fuel is cleaner than another. “We add
fuel oxygenates to motor vehicle fuels to increase octane and make them
burn more cleanly, and ethanol has substituted for MTBE (methyl
tertiary-butyl ether) and some of the other oxygenates,” she said.
Second, she noted that diesel fuel combustion creates a great deal of
air pollution. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and
other regulatory authorities have sought to develop cleaner diesel fuel,
and biodiesel has been thought to be a pathway to development of
cleaner alternatives.
Third, she identified the problem of indoor air pollution from
burning biomass fuels for household heating and cooking. Such fuels are
very dangerous in terms of the pollution they produce indoors.
Alternative fuels that burn more cleanly could replace the biomass fuels
or could be used to generate electricity for households thus reducing
exposures within the home environment.
At the same time, Goldman said, it is important to take into account
the life-cycle effects of the various potential energy sources. Thus, when
considering air pollution levels, it is important to take into account not
only the air pollution that is generated by fuel combustion, but also the
air emissions that occur across the entire life-cycle of growing the plants,
producing the fuels, and transporting the fuels. Unfortunately, she said,
“that is not generally how we perform risk assessment.”
Reducing Greenhouse Gases
A second major policy goal is reducing air pollutants that act as
greenhouse gases. “We know that global climate change already is
having a profound impact on the public’s health,” Goldman said.
However, as Timothy D. Searchinger, Princeton University, pointed out
in his talk, it now seems that some of the early assessments of the
potential of biofuels to reduce greenhouse gasses were overly optimistic,
largely they did not take into account land-use changes.
She asserted that although it was once thought that biofuels would
play a significant role in efforts to reduce greenhouse gases, no clear

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ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH POLICIES AND OPPORTUNITIES 139
benefits have been demonstrated by current alternatives. This clearly
underscores that it is crucial to do a careful life-cycle assessment when
considering the benefits of using biofuels.
Increasing Fuel Security
According to Goldman, fuel security is an important public health
issue. For example, she said, “Increasing fuel security could potentially
increase national security and thereby prevent adverse health impacts
that are related to regional and global conflicts.” Such impacts occur as
the direct result of conflicts, she said, but they can also occur indirectly
because of the displacement of civilian populations during conflicts and
morbidity and mortality impacts on such populations.
However, Goldman said, U.S. energy use per capita is so massive
and the potential production of biofuels so small by comparison that, to
date, conventional biofuels have had very little impact on fuel security in
the United States, nor is there evidence that biofuels have had a major
impact on fuel security in most other countries in the world. Of course,
she added, there is always the hope that newer technologies will produce
biofuels more efficiently and thus change the fuel security equation.
Benefiting Rural Economies
Another way that biofuels could affect health is through the benefits
they provide to rural economies. This is not something that would
normally appear in a risk assessment framework, Goldman said, but it is
certainly reasonable to believe that biofuels production could support
efforts to rebuild the economies in some rural communities, which would
lead to improvements in health not only by rebuilding health care
systems but also by supporting other basic infrastructure needs like trans-
portation and education systems.
However, she added, the outmigration of young people is thought to
be responsible for many of the negative impacts on rural communities.
Economic development that enables young people to live and work in
rural communities is an important policy objective but, as other speakers
had pointed out, evidence to date indicates that biofuels production is
resulting in dramatic increases in jobs that would serve as a strong
incentive for retaining young people in these communities.
Yet another factor—which is almost never considered in a risk
assessment context—is the potential effects that boom-and-bust cycles

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can have on health. Such a situation can arise when an industry expands
rapidly and creates jobs creating a boom, and then contracts quickly
because of changes in incentives, subsidies, or mandates or resource
constraints, resulting in a bust. She said that this can ultimately have a
negative effect on the health of the community’s members.
One other factor that Goldman considered is the potential depletion
of soil and water resources caused by biofuels production. Soil resources
can be damaged by overfarming in marginal areas. Depletion of water
resources has been of greatest concern in areas dependent on
groundwater sources like the Ogalalla aquifer, which is very slowly
renewable. Depletion of soil and water resources could damage rural
economies and the health of people who live in those parts of the
country, now and in the future.
Increasing Energy Availability
Another factor to consider concerning biofuels is the effects on
health of increasing energy availability, both now and for future
generations. This is another factor that is not usually considered in risk
assessments, Goldman said, but for people who live with little available
energy, major health benefits are associated with increasing energy
supplies. There is evidence that increased availability of energy improves
health only up to a point, however (Wilkinson et al., 2007). “There is
very little evidence that the level of energy consumption that we have in
the United States, for example, is actually beneficial to our health,” she
said. “It is possible that we have some health impacts from overcon-
sumption.”
At the lower range of energy availability, however, the health
benefits of increasing energy availability appear in several ways. Having
light available in households helps to promote reading and literacy.
Sources of energy that do not require a great deal of manual labor by
children and women—e.g., gathering firewood and fuel—makes it
possible to spend more time and effort on education and economic
activity. Availability of electric-powered refrigeration both improves
food safety and makes it possible to deliver immunizations to more
people.
Many parts of the world need more clean energy, Goldman said, and
biofuels have the potential to provide local sources of such energy in
those countries. However, legal mandates in places like the United States
and the European Union may be making biofuels less affordable in

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ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH POLICIES AND OPPORTUNITIES 141
developing countries by artificially increasing demand for biofuels in
industrialized countries. Furthermore, if biofuels production leads to
increased food prices, that could offset any benefits to health.
The availability of energy for future generations—the “well-being of
our children and our grandchildren”—is of particular concern to
Goldman. An important question to ask in this regard is whether biofuels
are actually renewables. “Many people seem to assume that they are,”
she said, but the presentations and discussions in the workshop had
indicated that may not actually be the case in the long run. A number of
factors bring into question just how renewable biofuels are: requirements
for chemical fertilizers and pesticides, soil losses over time, and the
increased use of water for growing the crops and producing the biofuels.
Sustainability of water use is particularly doubtful when the water is
coming from fossil water supplies, like the Ogallala aquifer, bringing
biofuels production into competition for the water with other human and
environmental purposes, and with preserving the water for future
generations.
Given the need to expand future production, there may be serious
limitations on how much biofuels production can be expanded, she said.
“That is the reality with growing populations as well as increasing
development worldwide—we will need to produce more food as well as
more energy.”
Again, she noted, the development of new technologies might lead to
a situation in which biofuels production is more sustainable.
In conclusion, she said, the governments of the Brazil, the European
Union, and United States, and other countries have moved forward
rapidly with mandates and subsidies to promote the development of
biofuels with very little consideration of the potential health impacts,
either today or in the future. A more important challenge, she said, will
be reengineering the policy process so that it supports the conduct of
health assessments before policy decisions are made, rather than after the
fact. “I think that is an enormous challenge that lies before us, not only as
a country, but for the world. I don’t have the answer, but I think it is
fundamental to the problem that we are looking at today,” Goldman said.
A SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT METHODOLOGY
The next speaker, Bernard Goldstein, emeritus dean and emeritus
professor at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public

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Health, discussed a sustainability assessment methodology proposed by a
National Academy of Sciences committee in response to a request from
Lisa Jackson, the head of the EPA, who had asked the committee to
come up with an effective way to assemble the various issues affecting
sustainability into a formal framework.
The resulting publication, Sustainability and the U.S. EPA (NRC,
2011a), is often referred to as the Green Book, as compared to the Red
Book, a 1983 National Research Council publication that laid out a
framework for risk assessment (NRC, 1983). The Red Book gave a
major push to the field of risk assessment, but even so, Goldstein said, it
took a while for risk assessment methods to be broadly adopted. He
expects something similar from the Green Book and its influence on the
frameworks that people use to assess sustainability.
As the committee that would produce the Green Book was forming
in November 2010, the EPA received a report that it was late in
responding to a congressional mandate for a risk assessment of biofuels.
The committee members took that as an example for the development of
the framework, Goldstein said, because “we had in mind that in the
future Congress would ask the EPA and other agencies for a
sustainability assessment of biofuels, not for a risk assessment.” Such a
sustainability assessment extends well beyond the issue of risk and
examines many different types of trade-offs. “That is what I will be
talking about,” he said.
The Evolution of the EPA
To set the stage, Goldstein offered a brief history of the EPA’s
approach to environmental protection policies. When the agency began
in the 1970s, it used a command-and-control approach to environmental
protection—“basically looking at the very dirty air and dirty water and
how to deal with that,” he said.
The agency’s move to a risk assessment approach was, in a sense, “a
response to the recognition that even though we couldn’t see it and touch
it, there were risks out there that we had to measure to be responsive to
[demands for] effective environmental policy and to what society was
demanding of us,” Goldstein said.
In time, Goldstein said, the agency will move into a sustainability
period. “Perhaps we are in it now.” There is already great work being
done in this area, he said, such as life-cycle assessment. That is clearly
one of the tools that will be needed for sustainability assessments.

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ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH POLICIES AND OPPORTUNITIES 143
This evolution was driven in large part by the sorts of problems the
EPA was facing, he said. The agency is no longer looking just at
regulating such simple issues as the effluents from a single pipe or a
single smokestack. Instead, it is facing multidimensional problems, and it
needs tools that allow it to look across those dimensions instead of
focusing on just one.
The Green Book
The committee that produced the Green Book was asked to answer
four specific questions. They were
1. What should be the operational framework for sustainability for
the EPA?
2. What scientific and analytical tools are needed to support the
framework?
3. How can the EPA decision making process rooted in the risk
assessment/risk management (RA/RM) paradigm be integrated
into this new sustainability framework?
4. What expertise is needed to support the framework?
The committee did not spend significant time in defining
“sustainability,” Goldstein said. Instead, it “finessed” the definition issue.
“As I think we all well know,” he said, “developing approaches to
sustainability is sometimes inhibited by people spending a lot of time
arguing over what we mean.” Some of the definitions suggested for
“sustainability” refer to goals, while others refer to process. The
committee, which Goldstein chaired, decided to approach it in terms of
process.
“What we simply said is that if you go back to the nation’s first
major environmental act, the National Environmental Policy Act [NEPA]
of 1969, signed by President Nixon, all of the aspects of sustainability
are in that act, even though the word sustainability is not mentioned. We
did this in part because we wanted to anchor this beyond any particular
political party.” But the key was that the 1969 act already explicitly
mentioned all of the same issues that the committee was dealing with.
Thus, Goldstein said, he “ruled out of order any discussion that had to do
with how to define ‘sustainability.’” Instead, the committee simply
worked from the 1969 act to define a word that did not actually appear in

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the act. NEPA1 states that its goal is “to create and maintain conditions,
under which humans and nature can exist in productive harmony, that
permit fulfilling the social, economic, and other requirements of present
and future generations.”
The Sustainability Framework
The sustainability framework that the committee developed for the
EPA has two levels, Goldstein explained. As can be seen in Figure 9-1,
everything starts with the “sustainability paradigm,” which, in essence,
sets forth the principles from which everything else follows. The
paradigm consists of three separate pieces. The first contains three
individual sets of principles—economics, environmental, and social, with
“social” including health issues. The second piece consists of EPA
sustainability principles and the third of various legal mandates relating
to sustainability.
“We suggested that the EPA needs a sustainability vision,” Goldstein
said, and that vision should be informed by the sustainability paradigm.
That vision should in turn be converted into specific goals and
objectives, and metrics, using indicators as needed. Industry has done a
very good job of developing and responding to sustainability goals and
objectives, he said.
The other components in Level 1 are organizational and cultural
issues, sustainability assessment and management, and periodic evaluation
and public reporting. The last piece is very important, Goldstein said.
“We need to know if we are meeting these goals. If we are not measuring,
we can’t really find out whether this is more than just hand waving.”
Level 2 of the framework expands the sustainability and management
component in Level 1. It begins with a screening process that examines a
particular decision under consideration to determine if it has significant
sustainability implications. “We can’t expect every single action of the
EPA to be governed by a relatively complex approach,” Goldstein said.
“Most actions will probably not need any major sustainability assessment.”
Assuming that further analysis is needed, the next step involves scoping
and options identification, stakeholder identification, indicator and
metrics selection, and assessing collaboration opportunities. Next comes
1
Available at http://www.epa.gov/compliance/nepa (accessed August 20, 2013).

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the scoping and application of sustainability tools at the appropriate level
of effort, followed by an analysis of the trade-offs and synergy involved,
providing the results to the decision maker, making and implementing
the decision, and evaluating the outcomes in order to inform future
decisions.
Sustainability Assessment Tools
The sustainability assessment process only works effectively with
the appropriate tools, Goldstein said. Risk assessment is an important
tool, as is health impact assessment (HIA). Life-cycle assessment and
cost-benefit analysis are two other well-known tools that are important to
sustainability assessment, and a variety of other tools also play a role:
ecosystem services valuation, integrated assessment models, sustainability
impact assessment, and environmental justice tools. Many more tools
need to be developed, he said.
It may take a while for some of these tools to be fully developed,
Goldstein said. He noted that the 1983 risk assessment framework
emphasized exposure assessment as an important tool, but it was not
until around 1986 that the first society for exposure analysis was formed,
and it was not until the 1990s that the EPA had a formal exposure
analysis program.
In that case the EPA’s risk assessment forum played a vital role in
developing the area of exposure analysis. “It basically sat down with all
of the players across the EPA and hammered out an agreement about
whether you extrapolate from animals to humans by body area or weight
. . . or whatever it was that needed to be considered.” Afterward,
exposure assessment was performed uniformly. Other workshop speakers
had already mentioned the importance of developing such a uniform
approach to life-cycle assessment, Goldstein noted, “and certainly we are
going to need that for environmental justice tools and for a lot of the
other tools that are needed for the assessment.”
In closing, Goldstein said, “I really think we are on the cusp of
developing these new tools. We need to, if we are going to face the kind
of challenges we have heard about in this meeting.” When the EPA
approaches an environmental issue, it should not think about the issue
just in terms of minimizing risk. Instead, it needs to think in terms of
how to maximize a whole collection of benefits while still minimizing
risk. It is a very broad approach to thinking about environmental issues,

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ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH POLICIES AND OPPORTUNITIES 147
he said, but “that type of breadth of approach is what we need for these
kinds of challenges, such as biofuels.”
A CALL FOR HEALTH IMPACT ASSESSMENTS
The panel’s final presenter was Richard Jackson, professor and chair
of environmental health sciences at the Fielding School of Public Health
at the University of California, Los Angeles, and former director of the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) National Center
for Environmental Health.
Jackson began by pointing out that many agencies of the federal
government, not just the Department of Health and Human Services but
also the Departments of Agriculture, Education, and Transportation and
many others, are involved with health in one way or another. This is also
true for the various agencies involved with energy. “If we have learned
anything from the past 2 days,” he said, “it is that these energy decisions,
biofuels, solar, fossil fuels, and the rest have health implications.”
Unfortunately, however, there has been relatively little attention paid to
the various ways in which energy decisions affect health.
“What I was struck by in the past 2 days is that I don’t think we have
ever done an adequate environmental impact assessment on biofuels,”
Jackson said. “I have probably read 100 environmental impact
assessments [EIAs]. What I have found is you review thousands of
pages, and the last three pages claim to be about health. For example, the
EIA will assert: ‘No air pollution standards, no water pollution standards
will be violated, no noise will disturb the neighbors.’ I assert, and the
Academy’s committee on Health Impact Assessment asserts: we don’t
adequately capture health in the environmental impact assessment
process, even though it is required under the National Environmental
Policy Act.”
Jackson described his experience serving on the joint National
Research Council and Institute of Medicine Committee on Health Impact
Assessment with Dinah Bear, who was with the Council of
Environmental Quality in the White House. She was a very experienced
lawyer with 25 years of experience, working on NEPA. When the other
members of the committee would say that they wanted HIA required
under NEPA, she would counter, “No, we already require health impact
assessment in NEPA. We just have not done it.”

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It is reasonable to expect that virtually all forms of biofuels will have
not just environmental impacts, but impact on health, Jackson said. For
example, growing corn for biofuels means that various nitrogen
compounds end up in the soil and the water because of fertilizer use.
Jackson, continued,
When the United States produced large quantities of
ethanol from immense quantities of corn, we clearly
need to examine the impacts on the environment, but just
as important are the impacts on health. Did the impact
assessment include the health impacts on contamination
of surface and ground water with nitrates from fertilizer,
a known cause of infant methemoglobinemia? Do we
examine the health effects of water contamination of
corn herbicides like atrazine and allocholor? How about
the loss of 7,000 square miles of prime seafood producing
areas of the Gulf of Mexico from eutrophication? Or the
air pollution produced by energy neutral burning of
fossil fuels to grow the corn? Do we capture the negative
impacts of inadequate production of “specialty crops”
like fruits and the production of foods we in public
health recommend over production of sugars and oils?
Jackson also showed some images from the book Portraits in
Biodiversity by David Liitschwager. One image shows all the various
organisms found in a cubic foot of a meadow in Cape Town, South
Africa, while another shows the organisms from a cubic foot in a U.S.
cornfield. The difference in biodiversity is striking—there are 10 or more
times as many organisms in the image from South Africa than in the
image from the U.S. cornfield. “When you think about it,” Jackson said,
“maybe that has long-term effects—not just environmental impacts, but
health and social impacts.”
In 2011 Improving Health in the United States: The Role of Health
Impact Assessment was published (NRC, 2011b). Jackson chaired the
committee that produced the report. “We had a mix of public health
people, also economists, international folks with a lot of experience,
toxicologists, and others,” he commented.
The committee concluded that health is affected by a broad array of
factors, including those that shape the conditions in which people are
born, grow, live, work, and age. Public health has been linked, for

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ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH POLICIES AND OPPORTUNITIES 149
example, to housing policies, transportation policies, urban planning
policies, agricultural policies, and economic-development policies. Thus,
Jackson said, it is important to make systematic assessments of the health
consequences of various policies, programs, plans, and projects in order
to protect and promote health.
“We asserted the need for ‘health impact assessment,’” Jackson said.
The committee defined it as follows:
HIA is a systematic process that uses an array of data
sources and analytic methods and considers input from
stakeholders to determine the potential effects of a
proposed policy, plan, program, or project on the health
of a population and the distribution of those effects
within the population. HIA provides recommendations
on monitoring and managing those effects. (NRC, 2011b)
Jackson said he believes that this definition makes HIA quite
different from risk assessment. “It not only captures the adverse effects,
but it captures the beneficial effects,” he said. “There are beneficial
effects to having 40 people have a job year round in an ethanol
production plant. There are beneficial effects to many of the changes that
occur in these communities.” On the other hand, there are also negative
effects, such as the boom/bust cycles that can occur.
HIAs also consider various types of evidence—not just toxicological
evidence, as in risk assessment, but many other types of evidence as
well. It also engages communities and stakeholders early and throughout
the deliberative process, not just at the end.
In practice, HIAs should not be restricted by a narrow definition of
health or restricted to any particular policy sector, level of government,
type of proposal, or specific health outcome or issue. Instead, they should
be focused on applications that present the greatest opportunity to protect
or promote health and to raise awareness of the health consequences of
decision making. In short, Jackson said, “It ought to focus on things that
are important. Don’t spend a lot of time doing risk assessment or health
impact assessment on things that don’t really matter. Worry about the big
issues that affect people’s health.”
The committee recommended a six-step framework for carrying out
HIAs. The steps were screening, scoping, assessment, recommendations,
reporting, and monitoring and evaluation. In the case of the use of
biofuels, the first five steps were not carried out before decisions were

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made, but it is not too late to monitor what happens. “Maybe we should
be tracking from a health standpoint as well as an environmental life-
cycle standpoint,” Jackson said. Once there are data concerning what is
going on, the data should be evaluated, and at that time some evidence-
based recommendations could be made.
One of the committee’s conclusions was that it is important to be
careful about quantitative estimates. “Numbers are helpful,” Jackson
said, “but just because you measure it doesn’t mean it is important, and
just because you can’t measure it doesn’t mean it is unimportant.”
One practical challenge in carrying out HIAs is synthesizing and
presenting results on dissimilar health effects in a manner that is
intelligible and useful to decision makers and stakeholders. Although
summary measures—such as quality-adjusted life years—can be used,
the committee recommended that effects be described and characterized
separately in a way that allows users to judge their cumulative nature.
In closing, Jackson said, “I do think that we in the health world need
to be touching on these energy decisions much more profoundly. . . . I
think we desperately need more research in the energy world, and we
need more research that touches on both health and energy.”
DISCUSSION
In opening the discussion session that followed the panel’s
presentations, John Balbus, National Institute of Environmental Health
Sciences, noted that each of the speakers had spoken of the time that it
takes to implement changes, but it is clear that there is a certain urgency
in the need for these sorts of assessments. So, he asked, “How do we
keep a real sustainability and health assessment from becoming the
cellulosic ethanol of environmental health, which is just 5 years away
and always has been and always will be? Who has the responsibility and
how do we get this process started?”
Goldstein commented that there is already work being done with
various sorts of health assessments, and there is a great deal of support
among EPA staff for HIAs. “They just don’t have a framework, a setting,
which allows them to move forward as readily as they could, if some sort
of framework was in front of them.”
Goldman added, “I would say that what needs to happen is that
people need to start performing health impact assessments, and not
waiting for mandates or waiting for administrative requirements.” An

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ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH POLICIES AND OPPORTUNITIES 151
approach that might be taken is to leverage private-sector efforts or
interest by industry in this area.
Visible movement forward on using these assessments, Goldman
said, may inspire the administrative changes that need to happen. “I think
that you are going to have to . . . lead by example.”
An audience member commented that most of the workshop
presentations had focused on sustainability, which involves protecting
resources for future generations. “I worry sometimes that by focusing on
a distant concept of future generations, we can overlook children today.”
So, she asked, are any of the tools that had been mentioned in the presen-
tations being used to protect children? Goldman agreed that the health of
children today is an important issue. She noted that many of the topics
discussed, including nutrition and adequate energy supplies, apply to
today’s children. Goldman said that freeing children from using all their
energy for work is important to protect their ability to learn and grow.
Jackson explained that because every action has an impact, the focus of
sustainability should be to achieve the maximum positive impact and the
least negative impact of each action. He stated that children today
deserve a world that is diverse and healthful, and while some things will
produce negative impacts, it is important to maximize the positives for
them.
Luz Claudio asked a question about making HIAs understandable to
policy makers and the general public, not just specialists. Jackson
commented that an HIA for a new subway was just being finished up in
Los Angeles. “It is about 100 pages,” he said. “It is written in absolutely
the most understandable language, and it captures multiple domains of
both risk and services.” It explains that it is not possible to put a subway
in without having negative impacts of various kinds in various areas, but
that there will also be positive impacts, and it is important to think about
how they balance out over time. “A well-educated lay person can read
this quite comfortably,” Jackson said. “It will really, I hope, help inform
a big important decision.”
REFERENCES
NRC (National Research Council). 1983. Risk assessment in the federal
government: Managing the process. Washington, DC: National Academy
Press.

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NRC. 2011a. Sustainability and the U.S. EPA. Washington, DC: The National
Academies Press.
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assessment. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
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